Dear Susan,

We are organizing our 30-year class reunion for this coming summer, and you’re on the “lost list.” It doesn’t surprise me; after the way we all treated you I cannot imagine that you would want to ever see us again, much less to share the intimate details of your life since leaving high school.

We were terrible to you. More particularly, I was terrible to you.

Back in junior high, when you first moved here, we became fast friends. After having gone to school with the same cohort of kids my entire life, it was refreshing to meet someone new. It didn’t matter to me that you lived in a mobile home or that your parents were older and didn’t have much money. It didn’t matter to me that you wore geeky clothes. It mattered that we were friends.

That is, it mattered until a more popular group of girls began making fun of you. I badly wanted their acceptance, so I went along with it. One day, I stopped talking to you entirely. I can still remember sitting there stony-faced at lunchtime while you cried and begged me to tell you what you had done wrong. The truth is, you had done nothing wrong. Your only “crime” was being undesirable to those I wanted to accept me.

After that, you had no friends at all for a time. When you found your niche in the Civil Air Patrol group, this unfortunately only gained you additional ridicule as we all began calling you “Susie Air Force” and laughing at your shiny patent leather pumps when you wore your uniform to school. The last I knew, you intended to enter the Air Force following graduation.

I’ve thought of you many times over the years and feel so bad for having been what can only be described as a cold bitch. I am so sorry. I hope that someday I will have the opportunity to tell you this in person and that you can forgive me. At a time when we all had tremendous angst in our young lives and were trying to figure out who we were as individuals, I made your life worse. You didn’t need that, and I not only dishonored our friendship, I dishonored the concept of friendship in general. From this I learned that one’s true friends do not tie such strings to a relationship. For all it cost me, and by extension you, I have not kept in touch with any of those girls since high school and they no longer figure in my life. You, however, do. I have never forgotten this lesson learned and I strive to treat people better as a result. I truly hope you have gone on to enjoy a good life and that our horrible behavior back in school has not enduringly colored your existence. Be well, my friend.

Love,

Debbie, age 47